Love’s Pure Flame

Book excerpt: Lady Azalais, daughter of a dead traitor whose lands are forfeit, whose mother is forced by King Henry II to wed the victorious and vicious Sir Hugo du Champ, is sent, in disguise, along with three falcons, first to her cousin in Parthenay, then to the court of Queen Eleanor in Poitiers. The man chosen by her mother to take the falcons and Azalais is the troubadour Sir Gervais du Quercy, notorious throughout the Limousin, one of the many landless younger sons of the Occitan, who must live by his skills with sword and song. Azalais is irresistibly attracted to him and he too finds himself falling in love, but with Azalais’s beautiful cousin Argentine. Wound together first at the court at Poitiers in a life of love, intrigue, and tournaments of arms and poetry, entangled by desire then separated by a war of rebellion, can true love triumph or will all be destroyed in Love’s Pure Flame?